After seeing ore and coal loads for $10 at my LHS, I went into deep sticker shock. Upon recovery I decided to roll my own. Started with some clear pine scrap and ripped it to width (1 1/8" for ore jennies, 1
1/4" for coal hoppers) on the radial arm saw. Cross cut to length, check for fit. Then produce the gently rounded mound-of-stuff look with a jack plane. Then paint the wood to dull down the bright white pine so it won't show thru. Cover with Elmers white glue and roll in sand. Sand scooped up from the tons of the stuff spread on the road by the town. Sifted it once to get a uniform size. They fit good, they look good, and the price is right. A train of loaded open top cars looks nicer than a string of empties. The train show ore jennies got a coat of paint on the cast zamac under carriages, and on the trucks. Together with the loads, they look much more convincing.
DS: Awesome. Who needs to break the bank? Just one question and 3 comments do I have:
-How did you color the sand, or do you live in Minnesota where the streets are paved with taconite? :) (Taconite seems to be a dull dark gray; hematite seems like more of an old rusty brown.)
-I bet a wood rasp or 'Surform' open rasp could be used to good effect when shaping the load, or to replicate an irregular load with several peaks.
-ISTR Cyril Freezer mentioning a way to make dummy loads easy to remove - bury a piece of steel in it and you can take it out with a magnet, if it's not stuck to the car (could use wax paper to prevent this from happening while the glue dries). This could be used to good effect with your wooden loads.
Cordially yours: Gerard P. President, a box of track and now some L-girders.
I'm up in NH, where the streets are sanded with plain old sand. The color is a grayish tan, probably a bit light for taconite, and not quite red enough for hematite. I rationalize this by imagining the cars are transporting unobtainium ore from a recently discovered New England deposit. This also helps explain the run-of-the-train-show mix of Ontario Northland, PB&LE, PRR, GN and SP jennies. They are leased until a glorious new unit ore train comes off backorder. Yet more handwaving will explain the Bachmann Shay motive power and the B&M bobber caboose. I visualize a deep shaft unobtainium mine since a open pit operation will take too much layout space.
Yes, anything you can do with an ordinary plane can be done with a Surform. Actually I did some of the final freehand shaping with a sanding drum on the radial arm saw, but anything works, even just a Swiss army knife.
I saw the magnet trick somewhere or other. I just plane the loads til they fit loosely before gluing on the sand. Gravity holds them in place, barring train wrecks. They fall out in my hand for merely inverting the car.
Well, all of your rationalizations contain sufficient versimilitude, I think. We all know that unobtainium, being by definition impossible to obtain, could certainly be found at infinite depth (and of course, all one needs to access the bottom of such a shaft is an endless rope). It all makes sense.
The Shay's hasn't got that Yankee aura, but it wouldn't be out of character for a steep, curving mine branch (the WM used them in that service), and heck, the NYC used shrouded Shays in New York City at one time. Who knows? There might have been Shays in Vermont quarries somewhere, for all I know.
How about a simple, prototypical "heavy weather, blackout reporting marks, and reletter" paint scheme for your secondhand ore cars? Don't even strip the factory paint. If it shows through, so much the better.
If somebody did want to color the sand, it might be possible to do so by using flat, thinned paint of the proper color as the adhesive.
I am looking forward to the opening of New Hampshire unobtainium refineries and any further discussions regarding this strange and marvelous material.
Cordially yours: Gerard P. President, a box of track and now some L-girders.
At one granite quarry (over the river in the People's Republic of Vermont) has fairly conventional 0-6-0 tank engine on static display, as well as an "air locomotive". It looked like a tiny steamer, but the boiler was actually a compressed air tank. They pumped it up on shop air and it was used hauling the big slabs in and out of the shops that carved them. Kept the shop buildings smoke free. Then there is an old geared logging engine down the road apiece at "Clark's Trained Bears", a road side amusement deal. I cannot remember whether it is a Shay or a Climax. It still runs, and hauls visitors in the summer. Great exhaust note.
That's a possibility. Boxcar red blotches covering the old road name and reporting marks. A crude new owners name stenciled on the sides. Terminally shabby.
Well I was thinking of shipping the ore off line for smelting. Due to lack of native coal, it's easier to ship the ore to a smelter near a coal mine than ship the necessary coal in from PA to fire a NH based smelting operation. Plus I haven't been able to visualize the looks of the smelter. Perhaps shipping off line will require an engine change facility down in the flat land. Geared locomotives (even Bachmann models of geared locomotives) are a tad slow. You would want to take off the Shay and couple on a real road locomotive for the long trip to PA. The mine ought to be toward the top of a slope, so the ore can be dumped into a wooden, gravity fed loader. The ore jennies are pushed under the loader and filled one by one. This locates the mine mouth perhaps 50 scale feet above the track. Ruggles Mine, an abandoned mica and calcite mine not far from here, was like that, right clean on the top of a hill. That was an open pit operation. They dug the top of the hill down a few hundred feet before the mine played out in the 1940's.
DS: The tank engine is what I picture when I think of NE quarry steam, which may be available-model mind-warping.
Was there much large-scale logging in NH in the old days, or did that logging loco come from Maine?
Hm. I believe one principle ore of unobtainium is that mysterious mineral known as 'leaverite', from which no metal can be usefully obtained, and which therefore contains significant quantities of unobtainium. Leaverite has extraordinarily variable appearance, so that may well be what you are shipping.
Are we sure the material is refined in coal furnaces? Its exotic properties (which are always exactly what is needed) and exceeding rarity must command a high price, which could therefore make more expensive methods, such as the various electric processes used for metals like aluminum and titanium, quite practical. I am quite certain that a phlogiston-powered direct method would even be useful, considering the huge economic value (to electronics mfrs) of the magic smoke produced as a leaverite by-product...
As for extraction techniques, I suspect they are the old reliable digging methods. The slurry-pump technology used for the recovery of fossil treacle (cf: Moore, 1969) is impractical, as the infinite depth of the mine requires infinite quantities of water, and dilutes the finite quantity of ore so that none can later be recovered, even with Avogadro tweezers...
I suggest that any secure-looking industrial building, with lots of ventilation and large electrical services, surrounded by a cyclone fence, with MIB's parked in the lot, would be an excellent model of an unobtainium refinery...it would look a lot like a small electric- furnace steel maker, such as produces fine tool steels.
Cordially yours: Gerard P. President, a box of track and some L-girders.
It's a Climax. I was up at Clark's a few years ago and asked the engineer/fireman if he gave cab rides. Yes. "Stand there (pointing) and don't touch anything." I stood in the corner of the cab for a hot, incredibly noisy, kidney jarring, two mile trip out and back. A great ride.
Ask when you're there, you might get a cab ride too.
I'll have to wait for spring to get with it a bit more before a trip over the notch to Clark's is worth it. Everything is still under a foot of snow up here. Clark's also has a collection of interesting, photographable, scratchbuildable vintage rail cars sitting around. Then there is the Hobo railroad a few miles further on in Lincoln. They have the original Flying Yankee under a long tent undergoing reconstruction. Loon Mt ski area has a little steamer running back and forth to the parking lot and the Conway Scenic Railway is worth a stop. The No. Conway station is a classic, as well as the Crawford Notch station.
Some years back I produced something like that for making loads of wood chips, which at the time couldn't be found commercially. I used some scrap heavy paper stock from a shirt package rather than scrap pine. Sawing up some wood scraps with a reasonably fine toothed saw blade made some appropriately sized HO scale wood chips.
To make the thing removable, I did something like this:
____________ | |
So to remove the load you (gently!) press down on the end without the support under it. If I remember right, for stability reasons I used regular corrugated cardboard or maybe 1/4" balsa for the vertical pieces, but it has been a long time since I have seen that particular load.
I believe it was on that train that was bound for Microville, which of course is so small that no one has ever found it on a map....
I have an inexhaustable supply of sawdust from the radial arm saw in the shop. I ought to model some B&M woodchip hoppers and make woodchip loads for 'em just 'cause I can. Speaking of which, I still wonder how they kept the woodchips from blowing away in the wind? The woodchip cars were just ordinary hoppers with their sides raised up an additional
5 feet, but still open on top. Or did they not fill them clean up to the top, letting the side extensions act as wind breaks?
The wood chip cars we have around here (Oregon & Washington) are a bit like the big bathtub gondolas used for coal loads, only most of them are made with plywood sides rather than the steel or aluminum used in coal service.
Some companies (Weyerhaeuser "logging" line in Washington that goes through Kelso and Longview, moving lumber and wood chips from the rough cut mill in Toutle to the industrial complex in Longview) don't seem to use any method at all of keeping the wood chips in the car. Speeds are low enough and green chips are heavy enough that they don't seem to blow out much at all on these types of operations.
In other cases, the gondola is covered with a gauze-like material that keeps the load in the car. I've never been able to figure out what this is made from. It appears to be something like screening used in doors and windows, so that it appears as if it isn't there except if you look very close at the car. I imagine that it is a disposable item, and gets broken when they unload the car.
Either way, most of the time the chip loads I have seen stick out over the top of the car sides.
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particular load shown here seems to have a much more solid appearance to it than what I have normally seen here in Oregon. Normally you can just barely see the film of the mesh over the top of the load.
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